[gradsusr] GrADS Milestones

Thu Apr 26 22:24:01 EDT 2018

Jim et al.,

I must add my own deep gratitude to Brian and Jennifer (especially), and so many others including Mike Fiorino for their immense and prescient work so many years ago.   Using GrADS, and the scripts I've written for it (some of which so, so many others have used), became such a part of who I was and am professionally that it's hard to imagine how my early professional life would be different without GrADS.   The first version of the plotskew.gs script was emailed to this list (or an earlier variant) in mid 1996, and at my first AMS conference as a graduate student in Norfolk, VA a few months later, I saw skewt plots from that (then horribly written) script shown in presentations from people I did not know.  It was a profound mixture of accomplishment, community, humility and satisfaction I felt at such an early point in my career that would not have been possible without the extraordinary work of Brian and Jennifer and their generosity with their time.

I personally view the advent of GrADS (along with the release of wgrib and later wgrib2--Thank you Wesley) as the foundation of a major revolution in the mid-late 1990s enabling real-time weather data processing and display at a time when the internet was nascent for the general public.       Remarkable synchronicity.

Again, many thanks to Brian and Jennifer.

Bob Hart

Professor of Meteorology

Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science

Florida State University

________________________________
From: gradsusr <gradsusr-bounces at gradsusr.org> on behalf of James L. Kinter Iii <ikinter at gmu.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2018 3:49 PM
To: GrADS Users Forum
Subject: Re: [gradsusr] GrADS Milestones

Dear All – Thanks to several of you who are offering praise and gratitude for GrADS. I would like to add COLA’s thanks to Brian and Jennifer. The original idea of putting together analysis and display of geo-registered data, with defaults suitable for atmospheric science and physical oceanography research and education, was a simple one, but, as it turned out, extremely powerful. The notion of making that package of code available to anybody, free of charge, and supporting it with new features, copious and useful documentation, and responses to user inquiries was unheard of two decades ago, but that also turns out to have been a powerful concept. Finally, evolving a code over a period of so many years, mostly in a backward compatible way, is something that normally takes an entire corporation to pull off. Brian started out doing it on his own, and after Jennifer joined COLA, they did it with a team of 2, along with debugging help and suggestions for improvement from all the users. The large number of users, the large number of figures on web pages and in scholarly journals, and the small number of lines of code are all testaments to the success and staying power of GrADS, which are in turn completely due to the ingenuity, dedication and collegiality of two people. For those of us who remember writing Fortran programs to analyze meteorological data and other Fortran programs to display the results of that analysis, the introduction of GrADS to our community was truly a quiet revolution that changed the way we did our work. While we often list GrADS among the contributions that COLA has made to the field, in truth, it is Brian and Jennifer who get all the credit. Thanks to you both. – Jim

****************************************************
Jim Kinter

Director, Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies

Chair, Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic & Earth Sciences
Professor, Climate Dynamics
284 Research Hall, Mail Stop 6C5
George Mason University
4400 University Drive
Fairfax, VA 22030 USA
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From: gradsusr <gradsusr-bounces at gradsusr.org> on behalf of Jeff Duda <jeffduda319 at gmail.com>
Reply-To: GrADS Users Forum <gradsusr at gradsusr.org>
Date: Thursday, April 26, 2018 at 2:11 PM
To: GrADS Users Forum <gradsusr at gradsusr.org>
Subject: Re: [gradsusr] GrADS Milestones

As a user since I started grad school in 2009, I remain a huge fan of GrADS. Even though I now use a lot of Python and matplotlib for plotting, GrADS still produces at least as high quality, if not higher quality, geographic plots than any other graphics software I have seen over the past 9 years, and is my first pick for plotting meteorological graphics. I will continue to use it, but am sad to see the support cease. Hopefully it will continue to be useful for years to come.

Thanks to Jennifer and the other support staff who kept GrADS going over all these years.

Jeff Duda

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 9:41 AM, John Ciolek <jciolek at alphatrac.com<mailto:jciolek at alphatrac.com>> wrote:

Thank you Jennifer, Brian, and the rest of your team for what you have done with GrADS!  I  hope you realize how much the atmospheric science community appreciates your effort and outstanding support.  I’m sure you will hear from many echoing that feeling as you truly deserve it.

John

On Apr 26, 2018, at 7:30 AM, Jennifer M Adams <jadams21 at gmu.edu<mailto:jadams21 at gmu.edu>> wrote:

Dear All,
The time has come to announce some changes at COLA that will affect all of us: the funding that supports GrADS has come to an end. Brian Doty will be retiring at the end of the summer, and I will be moving to NASA/GSFC to work in the Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC). Both of us will continue to be active GrADS users, and our plan is to move the source code to GitHub where it will become a more traditional open source project. Our development and support of GrADS going forward will be a volunteer effort, but I sincerely hope you will not interpret this news as a reason to stop using GrADS. We feel that our recent changes to GrADS make it a flexible and extendable tool with a stable core and the necessary hooks for further customization by ambitious users. COLA will continue to host this forum, and I will remain as the moderator and frequent contributor. I promise to do what I can to ensure that GrADS remains relevant, useful, and fast.
—Jennifer

--
Jennifer Miletta Adams
Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA)
George Mason University

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John Ciolek

Senior Atmospheric Scientist

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AlphaTRAC, Inc.

Cell: 720-365-5900

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--

Jeff Duda, Research Scientist

University of Colorado Boulder

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

NOAA/OAR/ESRL/Global Systems Division

Boulder, CO
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